Angelelli martyr and now blessed | The ceremony will be …

Next Saturday, the province of La Rioja will be the scene of the beatification of Monsignor Enrique Angelelli, badbadinated by the last military dictatorship on August 4, 1976. This fact implies the acceptance by the Church of the martyrdom of the death. Bishop of Riojan, a condition that is also recognized by the priests Gabriel Longueville and Carlos de Dios Murias, as well as by Catholic laity and peasant activist Wenceslao Pedernera, who collaborate directly with Angelelli. The proceedings will be chaired by the Bishop of Rioja Dante Braida and will participate as a representative of Pope Francis Cardinal Angelo Becciu, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The recognition that is made now implies that the Church considers Angelelli and his collaborators as an example of life for Catholics and for society. After a long process, the judiciary pbaded a fundamental stage on July 19, 1986, when Judge Aldo Morales established that the bishop's death was a premeditated homicide. Years later, on August 4, 2014, the Federal Oral Court of La Rioja sentenced soldiers Luciano Benjamín Menéndez and Luis Fernando Estrella as intellectual authors of the homicide.

On the ecclesiastical level, the process also encountered obstacles, difficulties and resistance from the Argentine episcopate. It is the former bishop of La Rioja, Marcelo Colombo, who made every effort to activate the cause of canonization before the Roman courts and found in Pope Francis an ally for the recognition of martyrdom become effective last year.

During the Holy Week that culminated, the current bishop of La Rioja, Dante Braida, recalled that "Angelelli sought to renew the Church's commitment to the poorest , seeking an integral development, being themselves the protagonists of this growth ". Gabriel Longueville and Carlos de Dios Murias, priests, said that "each gave his life together, through the proclamation and experience of the Gospel, as part of a concrete community".

At the initiative of Braida, a multisectoral commission was created to prepare the tribute. It includes ecclesiastical representatives as well as the provincial Ministry of Culture, human rights organizations, trade unions, the Organization of Former Political Prisoners and the National University of Laos. Rioja. among others.

While the central acts will take place all week in La Rioja, the beatification of Angelelli and his fellow martyrs is a mobilization of a large part of the Catholic Church throughout Argentina. A group of Catholic bishops who are in Rome these days during the "ad limina" visit to meet Francisco, will hold its own celebration at the Vatican on Sunday, April 28th.

Editora Patria Grande, who published a book of poems by Bishop Angelelli in 1977, reissued this book with a prologue by Monsignor Marcelo Colombo, Vice President of the Episcopal Conference. In the text, the head of the Archdiocese of Mendoza states that "behind are the silences, cowardice and denials of those who did not understand the message of Enrique Angelelli or readily accepted the sneaky and "rebaduring" version of the accident accident ".

The writer and theologian Oscar Campana also published a book entitled His Blood in the Mud. Enrique Angelelli, martyr of the Rioja (Publishing House of San Pablo), in which he brings together not only the life of the bishop and his main teachings, but also the testimony of many people who l & # 39; have known and shared his life. Cordovan Luis Baronetto (author of The Life and Martyrdom of Bishop Angelelli), one of the leading biographers of Angelelli, is recorded there, saying that "it is not easy to to kill a bishop in a Catholic country.And Angelelli, always faithful to the Catholic Church, foreshadowed a poor church and changed place in society by placing her as "maid" (Paul VI) of the "oppressed" . And he adds that "neither his peers in the episcopate have tolerated it, except in some cases".

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